


His Woundes Bleeding By Day and Night

by landofspices



Category: Robin Hood (BBC 2006)
Genre: Angst, Episode Related, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Marian POV, Post-Walkabout, Premature Ejaculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-18
Updated: 2016-04-18
Packaged: 2018-06-02 23:01:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6586381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/landofspices/pseuds/landofspices
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An episode tag for "Walkabout". What if Marian attempted to console Guy after the (frankly quite terrifying and traumatic) day they shared? </p><p>(I admit this is the result of my best friend and I having a "what sort of sexual encounter do we think they could actually, plausibly have?" conversation, and I ended up ... writing this.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	His Woundes Bleeding By Day and Night

**Author's Note:**

> for Eve.

_Lully, lullay, lully, lullay,_  
_The faucon hath borne my make away._

_He bare him up, he bare him down,_  
_He bare him into an orchard brown._

— Middle English lyric

 

Marian of Knighton; Lady Marian of the strong white hands and flaming heart; she who will burn with the city a thousand times before giving herself up to flight. She who will yield herself up to ash, but not to fear. She who stood waiting with no weapon in her hands, though she can bend a bow and wield a blade like the knights of King Richard. In her ears there was only the far away chime of the bright gates which ever open on the other side of fire, and a rustle of wings. She thought of her mother and father awaiting her, and doubted not the wisdom of her choice: this kept her more steadfast at Guy of Gisborne's side, as he trembled, than any sword.

His wrist flinched and sweated under her hand when she clasped it, and she knew he was not thinking of Heaven, but of death. Now she waits for him, because she is no longer needed: the hour of their death is past. _I am not in Purgatory, she thinks, I am not called to account for any sin of mine, with the promise of all goodness before me. I live, against my expectation._ It's sweet to draw her breath, to watch the stars from her window: they are magnificent, almost gaudy in their brash glimmering.

Hooves thunder on the stones and she knows it is Guy, come back. Lady Marian does not go to meet him in the courtyard; he must have had enough, she thinks, of public spectacles; he must have had plenty and to spare. She wraps her silver cloak about her and picks up a taper. _I will wait in the passage close by his chamber_ , she thinks, opening her door and passing the threshold with silent step. _There can be nothing wrong in it, when he has so often lingered, waiting for me to come out or to pass by._

They were together, waiting for Robin to come, and she watched Guy's bowed dark head. His hair was ruffled; his face hidden from her sight. She remembered the day he came close to being drowned by Robin's hand, how that cruelty sickened and astounded her. _I do not truly know anyone_ , she thought: _I do not understand a single man walking this fair earth_. Afterwards Guy's face was bruised, his hair sodden and his lashes spiked as if with weeping. When he asked her, again, today, for her answer: how his low voice broke over the words, like a boat caught by hidden rocks. She had not imagined he would return. That he should prefer death with her to life without her still seems a thing impossible and fragile and hard to countenance.

He is as unlike Robin as a man can be. Nothing he has of Robin's lightsome strength, the surety that keeps him ever ready to right wrongs and fight battles. Guy is dark, is fearful: she has never understood, before today, how afraid he is. Her heart gathered in itself a new feeling, an ache for him, half pity and half kindness. He has done much wrong but he does not, she is certain, take sickly joy in the doing of it as Sheriff Vaisey does. He is not a good man, but there was a time when he could have been one. That is another thing lost, gone to waste.

The sparks of his hard-won courage stand out brightly against fear, against dark doings: how he came back to her, willing to stand the razing, though he was much afraid. She remembers, now, though all day she has been too busy to recall it, that his parents died in a great fire, when she was but a nursling.

Marian hears his step and the clink of spurs before she sees him. He is lit, as she is, by the glow of a single taper, and it makes him look pallid, hollow, weary. His face is begrimed and his eyes purple-ringed with fatigue.

"Guy," she says, stepping forward, "What happened?"

He starts at the sight of her, or perhaps at the sound of her voice, and swallows hard. For a long moment it seems he has no words for her, with their positions thus strangely reversed: he approaches, she awaits, when usually it is quite the other way. Now he is lost and quiet, his eyelids fluttering.

At last he says, "I lost him in the forest. The Sheriff – " He breaks off, shaking his head, and Marian cannot be sure if he is ashamed or angry. Usually she knows full well, but his weariness lies over him like a veil. It slows his movements, softens his eyes, washes the strength from his voice. She feels a sudden pity for him, and does not know how to slake it.

Guy brushes past her without courtesy. This above all betrays his exhaustion: he has used her thus only once before, and it was during the horrible months after their unconcluded wedding Mass. She saw the shame in the burning gaze he turned upon her whenever they met, the grief and rage in his refusal to accord her mannerly treatment. It irked her every time she had to see him, yet she understood. Now he is almost his old self with her again. He is full of longing, but often tremulous when he speaks to her; passionate, even, but afeared as an untried lad. She knows full well that he has not led a life of blameless chastity, so it is hard to understand how he can both desire and shrink from her. But he always tries to be seemly, to be in his shy way as cordial as he can: and so tonight's distance is the stranger. She can see that he is not wounded in body, but she thinks rather of his heart. All day he has foreseen the conflagration of Nottingham: a pyre hundreds of times greater than that which turned his parents into nothing but fine ash on the four winds. All that he knew was to disappear, including she, Marian, by her own choice: she was to have perished there in the inhuman spit and roar of flame. It frightens her a little, that he came back: to be loved like that is no light thing.

She collects herself and follows him into his chamber, where he is sitting limply before the cold, ash-strewn hearth on a plain chair. He is half in and half out of his leather jerkin, as though his strength has given out on him. Under it he wears a black shirt, open at the throat, and in the shadowy, moonlit room his white skin looks hardly like a natural thing of this earth: _as if he were a corpse, or leprous_ , she thinks. And then she shivers and whispers a prayer against such cruel thoughts.

Marian kneels before the hearth to kindle a fire. She knows how to do it; she insisted on learning, as a little child, and in Sherwood Forest she learnt all over again. She knows every way of doing it, quick and slow, Djaq's way and Much's way, Will's way and John's way. Cleverness and perseverance: you need them both, and can dispense with neither. Now the Outlaws have given her the gift of freedom: she does not need to call a serving-maid to tend the fire and warm the wine; Lady Marian, who is proud as a queen when it suits her, is not too proud for that.

She feels the fire's heat soaking into the room, which is full of stone-chill and, though she knows it is fanciful, a feeling of loneliness. _It would be easy_ , she thinks, _if Guy did not love me_. _He needs me, doesn't he? To be his friend, since I cannot be wed to him._ She has never visited this chamber before and she wonders, suddenly, if anyone does apart from Guy himself and the servants. A woman? A friend of whom she has not heard? She turns to look at him, and he raises his head. For a fraction of a moment she sees tears in his blue eyes, unmistakable in the firelight, but his eyelids close to shut them in and she feels at once how unkind it would be to say a word about it. Instead she brings him a goblet of warmed wine and curls his right hand – the hand already peeled free from his leather clothing – around it with both of hers.

Marian's touch seems, strange to say it, painful to him. He flinches as he did when she touched his wrist earlier in the day: but then they were facing certain death, then he might well be stricken with private fear and doing what he could to hide it and keep control of himself. Now they are alone and he is desperately weary, in need of friendship if ever a soul was, and he seems near as afraid as he was during the siege.

He whispers her name, only her name, "Marian," very low. It might be a question, it might be an answer.

Marian gently peels the leather jerkin away from his back and down his left arm. It is damp with the sweats of terror and failed pursuit of Robin Hood, and she sets it aside on the floor to be cleaned. She has seen him more undressed than this, but not commonly, and she has never been close to him: he is smaller without his jerkin, as all men must be, but somehow in his case the change is worth remarking.

Guy sips the wine she gave him. She sees that his hands are shaking, but she does not know what to say, how to give consolation. She tries to remember everything her father told her of the Gisborne fire, everything her mother told her, and her mother's women: the gossip, the idle remarks, the things it's too easy not to pay any mind to. She knows, of course, that Robin's father died there too, but it is a long time ago, before her own memories take on colour and shape; as a child, she imagined Robin's father as an older Robin, merry and brilliant and full of risk and righteousness. She even wept for him. The Gisbornes were just names: a tragic inconvenience, in truth, for Robin's family. That was all the character she gave them. Now she remembers more: _the whole house, nothing was found, the children were banished, one young boy and a little girl too_. And another thing, something she is befuddled and angry with herself for forgetting: _it was his fault, Guy's, silly child, three deaths on his head and their lands lost_. The words come back to her blade-sharp, cold as the morning when she heard them spoken by Edyt, the oldest waiting woman, as she combed Marian's mother's enviable hair and half-listened to Marian, desultorily plucking her lute, while Marian listened in turn to the talk of the women.

"Do you remember," she says, making her voice as gentle as it can be, "The fire? Or have you, perhaps, tried to forget? I thought that today – " She pauses, stilling her voice and sinking down to sit quietly on the arm of his chair: closer than she has ever willingly been to him in leisure-hours, with no one to cozen.

His trembling stops and she feels his body, so close to hers, become entirely still.

"Marian, I – no," he says. "Please, don't – " His voice is steady and assured when he speaks her name, which makes it all the more astonishing that he cannot manage even half a sentence: that he cannot even warn her off what is, apparently, still ground too sore to touch. His voice strangles and cracks, and it is all too clear that he ceases speaking for fear of being unable to refrain from tears.

He swallows some more wine convulsively and then sets the cup down on the floor and puts one hand across his eyes. Marian is shocked by his grief, though her own is fresh and bitter: she supposed that she has, in truth, believed she would come to bear it better, and it is frightening to think of feeling so sorrowful, this many years hence, and lacking even a friend to tell your burden to.

She knows it isn't wise but her heart moves her, not her wisdom, and she draws him into her arms. Seated on the arm of his chair, Marian is the taller, and Guy's warm, damp face presses into her neck. His body is at first as still as statuary, though she has every other sign that he is a living man: the gush of startled breath; the first tear falling, shockingly hot, onto her skin, then the second, the third, the fourth; his sweat-dewed hair, and skin soft as a woman's except where he is stubbled, and there it is so prickly and the sensation altogether new to her. But he begins to shiver at her touch, and she is unsure whether to speak, or go away, or whether coming to him in the first place was a mistake. Then she feels a rush of warmth in his skin and knows he is blushing, so she says, "Guy, it's all right. You're safe. It's over now."

Guy's hot face is close against her neck and she feels him bite his lips together hard. Where is all his shame and shyness coming from? She lifts her hand and strokes his hair, as she has seen the peasant mothers do to soothe their children. "It's all right," she says again, feeling her lack of understanding. "It's all right."

Guy says, the words a desperate, shamed, urgent whisper against her skin, "It's not. It's _not_. Oh, Marian." His body jerks suddenly in the chair and goes still, and for one dreadful moment she thinks he has taken a fit, but then he raises his head from her neck and she sees that he is flushed and that there are tear-tracks on his cheeks, and above all that he is wearing a look she has never seen on his face before: an expression of astonishing self-disgust.

"I'm sorry," he says in a low, unhappy voice. "I don't know what – I couldn't – " She takes one of his shaking hands between both of hers, not knowing what to say. She frankly does not understand the cause of his distress, nor whether he supposes it ultimately his own fault or hers.

"Go to bed, Sir Guy," she says softly, rising from the arm of the chair, still holding his hand. "You need rest." She strokes his fingers with her thumb. "Do not be so troubled; all is well enough in Nottingham tonight, and you have done well." Marian places his hand carefully on the arm of the chair and smiles at him, makes a small curtsey for form's sake, and takes her leave. She has done her best, and it will serve. There are other duties still awaiting her, and prayers to be said for her parents' souls before she can sleep. But in the cool grey passage she feels a wash of sorrow for him, a sorrow which she cannot understand, or purge by prayer.

*

In Guy of Gisborne's chamber, a black knight sheds his chemise, his leather breeches, and at last his linens, which are soiled with spend. No better than a boy, he hears the voice in his head – which speaks for Sheriff Vaisey when Vaisey himself cannot be physically present – say, almost kindly. It is better that you do not have her, Guy, for you don't know what to do with her. _I know_ , he says, _I do know; I couldn't help it; I'm sorry._

He rubs his eyes roughly, not soothing the tears but reproving himself for such weakness. Naked, he splashes himself with water to wash it away and then dresses quickly: cilice, shift, stockings. He will not sleep now, and risk a dream of the fire, of Maman gasping in the red flames and Robin's father and his own, sick, dear father, all lost in the confounding ash. No, he will not dare that.

Guy opens one of Vaisey's ledgers, and turns to his work. The flames say, you sinner, you sinner, you sinner. 

*

_And in that bed ther lith a knight,  
His woundes bleeding by day and night._

_By that beddes side ther kneeleth a may,  
And she weepeth both night and day._

— Middle English lyric 

**Author's Note:**

> In my headcanon, Marian knows some of the childhood trauma stuff (fire) but not all of it (leprosy).


End file.
